Differential treatment in the youth justice system - Equality and ...

DIFFERENTIAL TREATMENT IN THE YOUTH JUSTICE SYSTEMThose officers who pursued adversarial tactics regarded these as justified,in that they targeted young people who they judged to be involved in offending.In making this assessment they tended not to take account of the damage doneto police/community relations in persistently targeting youths from minority groupswho saw themselves as unfairly over-policed.The government’s commitment to improving public confidence in policing is to bewelcomed. However, the most important target audience for any ‘confidence-building’strategies are those groups most at risk of involvement in crime which, in the sorts ofarea which we studied, are likely to be teenage boys and young men from sociallydisadvantaged ethnic groups. Any assessment of the value of stop and search andsimilar tactics needs to take account of the impact that the tactics have on thesegroups, in terms of trust in the police.Police leadership• A shift away from adversarial to professional policing will happen if there arechanges to policing values.• For this to occur, there has to be clear and visible leadership about the qualityand style of policing that senior officers expect their staff to deliver, and about thestandards of professionalism that are required.• Leadership of this sort must flow from the most senior ranks through police forcesto frontline supervisors (that is, sergeants and inspectors).• Frontline supervisors need to pay as much attention to the quality and styleof policing achieved by frontline staff as they do to the number of arreststhey achieve.Monitoring of police practice• Effective monitoring needs to be conducted by sergeants and inspectors toensure that stop and search is appropriately employed and the same youngpeople are not inappropriately and persistently targeted for stop and search.vii